Gendered hegemony and its contradictions among Finnish university physicists

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of gender imbalance in Finnish universities in the domain of physics as a historical and dialectical phenomenon. Drawing from the Gramscian notion of hegemony and the activity-theoretical notion of contradiction, this paper analyses gendered hegemonic and contradictory forces steering physicists’ careers. This article argues that hegemony is to be seen as a historical and dialectical process rather as a status quo; it introduces methodological tools for analysing the maturity of hegemonic struggles in empirical data and envisions future developments for more gender-balanced academic communities. The empirical analysis of this article is based on interview data with 36 Finnish university physicists. A discourse-analytical framework is utilised to disclose hegemonic and contradictory forces as manifested in the data. This study shows that instances of resistance are present in the activities of the interviewed physicists even though consent to the prevailing hegemonies still persists.

Keywords:

• equality
• higher education
• workplaces
• science and technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was partly supported by an Academy Research Fellowship granted to Annalisa Sannino (no. 264972) by the Academy of Finland, Research Council for Culture and Society [grant number 264972].

Notes

1. The UPGEM acronym stands for Understanding Puzzles in the Gendered European Map.

2. In the interview extracts reported in this article, P stands for ‘primary document’ (a technical term in Atlas.ti software) and running numbers refer to the particular interviewee and to the speaking turns. For instance, P201, 289:292 refers to interviewee 201, speaking turns 289 to 292.

3. The choice of focus on gender differences stems from the fact that the data present minimal differences between generations of academics and different fields of physics.

4. As sexual harassment appeared as a dominant theme in both the category of critical conflicts and conflicts, we made the decision to merge these categories.